Category: Astronomy

So Solar Eclipse 2017 has come and gone. I managed to be outside for it – only partial here in Boston unfortunately. I put together a nice little shoebox viewer, which worked quite well. It was virtually impossible to get a good photo of it though, so no pictures. I was up Wright Tower in the Middlesex Fells where lots of others were out with a multitude of various ‘devices’ to see the partial eclipse.

So while I didn’t get a good shot of the sun being blocked, I did come home and hit up a web site with a series of satellite images of the US as the eclipse moved over the country. Below is a gif of the transit:

You can see the sun slowly rising over the western part of the country followed by a dimming of the light over Washington State and Oregon. The white splotch is presumably from the total darkness of the total eclipse area.

Most interesting is watching the speckled ‘cloud’, which looks like rising humidity as the day progresses, around the gulf of Mexico – Texas coast to Florida and up into Arkansas and Tennessee. When the totality of darkness moves through the area, this cloud disappears for a while, only to reform when it passes. Pretty cool effect!